Finally finished with this one (took 3 months since I started, though I admit much of it was just idling time or lack of inspiration ). First time doing a remix and spending so much effort on a song only 2 min long though, my back is killing me.

It's definitely unlike all my previous songs, just by the style of it and complexity. It's also a very happy song, good for "cheering" people up I guess lol.

Hardest part was figuring out the instruments and trying to get the sheer number of them to sound well together - was a very good learning experience and made me appreciate just how hard it actually was to make the original. For the longest time, it was a very slow and boring song. The piano came last and really was what did it. I suck at making a flutes-only song I guess.

Not a well put together piece but it's been sitting in my work folder for 2 years and I couldn't think of anything to build off it. Just going to close the song up - it's not bad but there's that feel that something's missing.

Some pretty major updates in the latest version of Tech Trader, the program I've been working on for about half a year now to automate my technical analysis in trading stocks.

The most impressive improvements currently are the AI and the parallelization of scanning multiple stocks. The AI is still in its basic stages but can easily find the best set of configurations for any given strategy; the next step is to have it come up with a new strategy altogether just from raw data. Batch processing of stocks was limited previously by instability if multithreading was turned on, but that has been cleared and the batch processing even sped up to allow the maximum threads your system can handle. At one point for me at least, there were up 25 stocks being scanned simultaneously; a trendline scan for every stock in the S&P100 takes under a minute to complete.

All in all, very fun stuff - can't wait to put this to use during market hours.

Finally put some of my photoshop skill to use for myself. It's a bit harder though than designing for a group, since then you'd have a theme to be working towards. Me? No idea what my theme is so I have a default one, a more colorful/flashy one, and a more peaceful Christmas-y one for the holidays.

The more colorful ones are from the Moviemakers Club obviously. It's such a waste to see all that work go unused otherwise.

But as far as general usage goes... hmm which one to be the default card?